In honour of Steve’s trip to Amsterdam here is a list of what I remember from my one visit there. We were there for a few hours during a school trip to the Netherlands when I was 14 so, perhaps contrary to your expectations, the lack of firm memories is not due to any misbehaviour on my part. Oddly, I remember far more about our few hours in Gouda. Mmmm, gouda. Anyway…
– a fountain in a square, around which we were forced by our teachers to congregate.
– the embarrassment of congregating around an obvious landmark and looking like one of those foreign tourist kids in Piccadilly Circus.
– a dusty old record shop with a very cheap cut-out copy of a Davy Jones solo LP in a revolving wire rack (I didn’t buy it and don’t remember seeing it since)
– the wooden inside of a room in a typical-Dutch-house museum, I remember a sense of discomfort but no details about the room
– being shepherded en masse by our teachers along a pedestrianised street which one of my friends told me was the red light district but can’t have been, though there were sex shops
– seeing our teacher speaking to a man who I swear was propositioning her
– finding a really good Undertones badge (Positive Touch design) for sale in some bazaar and being very disappointed when they’d run out
– a horrible packed lunch as made by our hotel including a tiny bag of disappointing plain crisps
– a manky little alternative record shop where (for some reason) I bought an unusual-looking and really long Robert Fripp single for pennies
– wandering off and being a bit late for our meet-up and running through pedestrianised, slightly rainy streets, following my friend and not being sure where we were going.
I feel I should know more than this from a visit to one of the Great Cities of Europe, but there you have it. I don’t recall anything looking characteristically Dutch and I don’t remember so much as one poxy canal.